The House With 100 Eyes (2013)

I usually start off these reviews with some insight but you know what, this is a random movie choice which I’m not so sure why I started up in the first place because it isn’t exactly up my alley of expertise or preference especially when it comes to horror genre.  But as most of you know, I’m willing to give most movies a go unless they are just flat-out dumb humor and this isn’t humor so…

Let’s check it out!

The House with 100 Eyes (2013)

Director: Jay Lee & Jim Roof

Cast: Jim Roof, Shannon Malone, Larissa Lynch, Liz Burghdorf, Andrew Hopper

Ed and Susan are a couple that are snuff filmmakers.  They are on their new feature and one that is special because its a triple feature: three kills all in one night.  In order to make this happen, they have wired the house with a lot of cameras to cover every angle possible to maximize their footage. They set out to get their three victims and end up with Jamie, Crystal and Clutch.

The House of 100 Eyes is hard to describe.  Its rather lackluster for the most part.  I’m not exactly the target audience for this and being that its something like a mockumentary/found footage sort of deal, it has some of those fuzzy and nauseating shots when the camera moves fast.  As a gory sort of thing, there isn’t a lot of blood except for maybe one or two parts.  But then, they make a big emphasis on violence and that gets pretty disturbing.  The movie is 75 minutes long but it takes about 20 minutes to set it all up or maybe longer but I didn’t bother to track the time because it was starting to have something go on other than Ed and Susan talking to the camera, seeking out their victims and failing, eating dinner and umm….jacking off to a disturbing video? I guess that’s spoiler territory so I’ll white that out so if you want to see that last part just highlight it, okay?

The best part of The House with 100 Eyes has to be Ed and Susan.  We get a good idea of where this is all going to go and what might possibly happen after all those “normal” portion is done and they finally get their victims.  Ed is definitely convincing in his role of the man being absolutely obsessed with violence and torture.  He’s pretty messed up and does plan out most of this ordeal.  His wife Susan also has that blank but somewhat disturbing sort of feeling with how calm she is and just how she plays the role of the reassuring lady who kind of mothers the victims a little to contrast the harshness of Ed’s character when he loses control a little of the situation.  They are a good pair in a chilling way.

Except I never quite understood why they were doing all this so openingly in public, like they didn’t really think what they were doing is illegal.  I mean, at some point someone must catch on that their house or their creeper style of picking up victims was a little off, especially when catching them shouldn’t be hard when they say their names all the time, which I can only assume are their real names.  Or I’m assuming more than I should, maybe, maybe not…

At a certain point when the plan starts going and they successfully lure them into their trap of filming the porn, its starts getting more intriguing just to see when things will go wrong, because you know they will. Its just how horror works.  There’s some blurred out nudity because its not really important here.  There’s violence and blood and torture as I mentioned before.  The one thing that I wonder is whether its the torture violence that was disturbing or the screeching crackling video audio that kept occurring every single time there was a “hit” on whichever character it was due.  Was it to dull out the brutality or was it just to make us cringe because of the annoying bad audio? It was a choice made by the director and one that I thought was a little manipulative in trying to make sure the audience would cringe at the scene even if it wasn’t about the violence but just the abrupt recurring audio screeches. I don’t know the term but I hope you get the idea of what I’m trying to say. It doesn’t help that they use those static moments to wrap up the credits because I just turned it off at that point before it drove me crazy.

The House with 100 Eyes is a peculiar feature.  I give you that.  Its violent and a little gory and maybe disturbing (even if its for possibly the wrong reasons).  There’s definitely a story here and its a little more intriguing in the last third but also has predictable parts.  The slow beginning doesn’t help much except try very hard in making us know the characters of Ed and Susan better, which I thought didn’t really need that much screen time to achieve because their actions that followed was suffice to prove that point. The House with 100 Eyes is not for everyone and even if you were into this sort of violent, torture-porn, found footage sort of deal, there are still flaws that are frankly a little hard to ignore, especially when its messing with your hearing. In the end, I didn’t even really see what the point of all this was.  Maybe there didn’t need to be one but I enjoy movies with one more than those that don’t, so that’s where I stand on this one.

Have you seen The House with 100 Eyes?